A BETTER TITLE for Paris Was a Woman would be How Lesbians Changed Western Civilization. This leisurely paced, handsome documentary--narrated with the plummy voice of one of my favorite performers, Juliet Stephenson--recalls the Left Bank life in Paris between the wars. The expatriates included Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who had an eye for Picasso and an ear for Hemingway; bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses; Beach's friend and lover, Adrienne Monnier, who introduced the lending library into France; and journalist Janet Flanner, who famously defined Cubism as "painting not what you see is there, but what you know is there." It is a talky film, but seeing one interviewee identified as "author and tattoo artist" tells all, really, about how a handful of women trying to make a new world for themselves inadvertently transformed everyone's.

Paris Was a Woman (Unrated: 75 min.), a documentary by Greta Schiller.